SPUC welcomes delay on morning after pill

27 December 2000

SPUC welcomes delay on morning-after pill Westminster, 27 December 2000--The Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has welcomed a delay in the wider provision of morning-after pills as: "a chance to rethink an irresponsible and potentially disastrous change to social policy." Paul Tully, SPUC's general secretary, said: "This is a breathing space during which we shall seek to raise public awareness of this potent drug. It is an abuse of medicine and it encourages the abuse of women. "We hope the government will also realise that wider provision of morning-after pills fails the government's own test of 'evidence-based medicine'. The move may even be counter-productive. It could actually lead to more registered abortions. "It is quite wrong to describe these pills as emergency contraception. They make the womb hostile to any newly-conceived embryo and thereby cause abortions. Selling these pills through pharmacists will turn high street chemists into frontline abortion providers. "As well as threatening unborn children, morning-after pills can harm women's health. "The 1990s saw a five-fold increase in prescriptions of morning-after pills yet the overall rate of abortion rose. Ms Yvette Cooper, the public health minister, has conceded that it cannot be proven that morning-after pills reduce the rate of recorded abortion. Furthermore, morning-after pills do not protect against sexually transmitted diseases." Last week the National Pharmaceutical Association announced that morning-after pills would only be nationally available without prescription from the end of next month. It has been suggested that this is because of a shortage of supply from Schering Health Care Limited, the makers of Levonelle 2, a brand of morning-after pill.